packrank is a library and command for ranking Haskell packages based
on how widely they are used.
cabal update
cabal install -j packrank
If you run the packrank command with no options, it will print a
list of all packages on Hackage, from least to most widely used.
The output will look something like this:
text 582
mtl 809
transformers 907
containers 973
deepseq 1286
bytestring 1299
array 1396
ghc-prim 9195
base 10000
The number after each package name has no objective meaning. It is simply a scale on which the most widely used package is assigned a score of 10,000. Why 10,000? This allows us to avoid printing out floating point numbers, which are much more difficult to read than integers.
If you run packrank with the name of a package, it will rank
only packages that transitively depend on the named package. For
example, here are the top ten packages that depend on attoparsec (as
printed by packrank attoparsec):
io-streams 1045
configurator 1071
yaml 1204
persistent 1246
conduit-extra 1282
xml-conduit 1301
fay 1436
snap 1467
snap-core 1728
aeson 10000
The mechanism that packrank relies on to measure use is simply the
Hackage dependency graph, which is conveniently cached locally on your
machine if you're a Haskell developer. The definition of "wide use"
is recursive: a package is widely used if it is depended upon by other
widely-used packages.
This way of measuring use cannot take into account some important data sources, so I don't claim that it is perfect.
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The number of times a package is downloaded from Hackage is not easy to obtain, but it is in any case not obvious how it should affect the ranking.
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Since executable-only packages on Hackage are not depended on by any other package, they do not influence the rankings at all.